Four or five other wretches, all in the buff and, as far as I could see, half drunk, sprawled like pigs over the bench, table, and floor of the pool room.
Since the room was small, and our companions the sort of people who eat cold, dirty food for supper and who drink pulque and chinguirito, they were producing an ear-shattering salvo whose pestilent echoes, finding no other outlet, came to rest in my poor nostrils, thus giving me in one instant such a migraine that I could not bear it, and my stomach, unable to withstand the fragrant scents, heaved up everything I had eaten just a few hours earlier.
The noise that my evacuating stomach made woke up one of the léperos there, and as soon as he saw us, he started to spew a blue streak of abuse out of his devilish mouth.
“You raggedy sons of bitches…!” he said. “Why don’t you go home and vomit on your mamas, if you’re already so drunk, and not come here to rob people of their sleep at this time of night?”
Januario signaled to me to keep my mouth shut, and we lay down on the billiard table; and between its hard planks, my migraine, the fear instilled in me by these naked men whom I charitably judged to be merely thieves, the countless lice in the blankets, the rats that ambled over me, a rooster that spread its wings from time to time, the snores of the sleepers, the sneezes that their backsides produced, and the aromatic stench that resulted, I spent the most miserable night.3
The woman on the front row lost her stonelike expression. When I referred to “the snores of the sleepers, the sneezes that their backsides produced, and the aromatic stench that resulted,” she shouted, filled with passion, “That, gentlemen, is the Mexico that I love!” And then when I asked if anyone wanted to ask a question or make a comment, she was the first to speak. “Coincidence of coincidences!” she said. “I came to the library to find some pamphlets written by my husband, Adam Karapetian, the anthropologist, deceased now unfortunately for twenty-five years in Medellín, Colombia, where I live, Armenian by birth, of course, as the surname implies. They are all studies about your country, inspired under the stars, written first in 1908 and again in 1924. On the latter date I accompanied him to the jungle. I was about to leave the library just now when I saw the announcement for a lecture on Mexico, yours, maestro. If my husband were alive he would have stood up to embrace you, because you both work along the same lines I can tell. I’m looking for those opuscules, some very difficult to find, they don’t have them in this library, but I am sure I’ll find them where I least expect it. The most important one concerns a feast in the tropics, a religious feast with a pagan end. Karapetian was only interested in the feast as an anthropological topic, the feast in Mexico, Bahía, Puglia, New Guinea, Anatolia. The one that most interested him was one in the middle of the Mexican jungle in honor of a holy shitting child. (Laughter.) No, one mustn’t be afraid of words, what one must consider is in what circumstances the feast was celebrated. I was there, I saw it all! The blazing sun and the land transformed into shit! It took twenty days for my nose to lose that stench!” And then she got up, put a card in my hand and left the auditorium with an air of extreme dignity. As the door closed we all broke out into laughter. The card read: MARIETTA KARAPETIAN, and below the name the inscription: FINE HAND PAINTED CHINA and, then, another line in tiny, almost illegible print read: I APPLY LEECHES. HYGIENE AND DISCRETION GUARANTEED. Who knows what that could be! I still haven’t met the translator of my novel Juegos florales [Floral Games]. I was hoping to talk to her after the conference, but she didn’t introduce herself. I’d love to walk around for a while, but I’m afraid of the dampness. I wouldn’t want to wake up with another cold tomorrow. Tonight I’ll finish Michael Strogoff, and then go to bed.